The present invention relates to methods and systems for facilitating payment of credit card bills.
Credit cards are an almost ubiquitous form of payment device used for carrying out financial transactions such as purchases at bricks-and-mortar or online retailers. It is relatively common for consumers to hold multiple credit cards linked to different accounts, and possibly issued by different financial institutions. Typically, a bill for each card will issue once per month, and making payment when there are multiple cards may be burdensome for the consumer.
Usually, credit card payments are made by one of the following three methods:
1) Cheque: The account holder has to visit a drop box or other physical deposit facility offered by the financial institution to deposit a cheque. Occasionally the account holder may forget to deposit the cheque, thus missing the payment deadline. In some cases if the deadline has been missed, the account holder may deposit a back-dated cheque in order to attempt to avoid any penalties. This is difficult for financial institutions to detect, and in the event of a dispute over the cheque date it may be more cost efficient for them to simply concede the point, rather than chasing late payment fees.
2) Electronic payment via online banking: In this case the account holder needs to add the details of each card as a payee in their online banking account. Each month when a payment is due, the account holder needs to login into their online banking account, enter the payment amount for each card, and approve the payment. Although more efficient than cheque payment, if there are several cards it may still be laborious, and still requires that the account holder remember to make payment before the deadline. Further, sometimes account holders may not want to share, with the bank which operates the online banking account, details of cards held with other issuing banks.
3) Direct online payment: In this case the account holder must visit the issuer bank's website, and make a payment via the issuer bank's payment portal. This is time consuming, and if multiple cards are to be paid, multiple logins are required to make payments.